Health ministry changes tack on tech
The Ministry of Health has scrapped its advisory body on information technology issues amid comments from one hospital manager that district health boards were receiving ‘‘mixed messages’’ on priorities from different authorities.
The ministry’s acting chief technology officer, Giles Southwell, said the seven-year-old National Health IT Board had met for the last time and would be replaced by a new Digital Advisory Board, which will have its first meeting on August 12.
The restructure comes as the Government revives a lapsed flagship initiative to create a system of electronic health records that has been tipped to cost tens of millions of dollars.
Southwell said the Cabinet had asked the ministry to assess the options and benefits of the records, which would provide a single view of people’s health information.
Shayne Hunter, the chief information officer of Capital & Coast, Hutt Valley and Wairarapa DHBs, painted a candid picture of the reality ‘‘at the coalface’’ of health IT during a presentation to the ITx technology conference in Wellington this month.
The three DHBs had about 1200 software applications to maintain and were spending the bulk of their $33 million annual IT budget on ‘‘keeping the lights running’’, he said.
‘‘It would be fair to say we have got a lot of conflicting priorities – a lot of mixed messages – so trying to make sure we can keep things moving forward and respond to national strategies presents some interesting challenges,’’ he said.
The Ministry of Health did not comment.
Ian McCrae, head of the country’s largest health software firm, Orion Health, said there had been a history of health IT underfunding across the country.
‘‘That is evidenced by servers being up to a decade old and very old versions of software that is hard to maintain. There have been programmes in many DHBs to sort that situation out,’’ he said.
‘‘The challenge for the National Health IT Board was trying to run a national health IT programme when it wasn’t really funded.
‘‘When you are trying to pull off these countrywide projects you have got to have some resources and they didn’t have it.’’
Some ‘‘progressive’’ DHBs such as Waitemata, Counties Manukau and Canterbury DHBs had pressed ahead with their own electronic health records projects which had ‘‘pretty much identical’’ objectives to the proposed national system. The question now was how they would fit together, he said.
The Government had originally proposed national electronic health records by 2014, saying they would provide a summary of a person’s GP visits, specialist and hospital treatment, test results and prescriptions that could be securely shared among health professionals and accessed by patients.
In addition to the regional DHB schemes, about 330 GP surgeries have partially filled the vacuum by setting up their own electronic patient portals, which are delivering a significant subset of the expected benefits of electronic records to the 136,000 patients who currently have access to them.
Southwell said National Health IT Board chairman Murray Milner would be involved in the new advisory board, but its chief executive, Graeme Osborne, would be moving on at the end of the month after making ‘‘a significant leadership contribution across the ministry and the wider sector’’.